A quick update on my “digital garden” project.

Things are coming together. I have decided to use Prezi for the site itself, and bought a paid educational membership. The one problem with Prezi is that it really isn’t meant for blocks of text – this is where MB comes in. I’ve decided to cross-post to MB everything I add to Prezi (except when I add small updates to a pre-existing element). If the element involves a large block of text, then I will provide a link and a summary on Prezi to the MB post.

The focus of the digital garden, to be entitled, like my MB site, “Wond’ring Aloud,” has changed somewhat. I am creating a topic called “Flywheel,” which is where I intend to publish my explorations into making my life more sustainable ecologically, economically, and emotionally. This is where I can put my research and actions regarding things like solar power, heating and cooling, gardening and food, transportation, and so forth. I’m calling it “Flywheel” because the basic premise is that I am tired of waiting for the mass of our culture to start behaving in a thoughtful fashion about our lifestyle, and instead I’m proceeding as if I am simply adding my own single push toward sustainability using my own life and specific situation as the starting point.

In addition, I will have another topic called “Words, Words, Words,” where I will put things like reviews of books I’ve read and the ideas that have arisen from them. A third topic will be called “Negative Capability” after John Keats' useful concept: “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This will likely be where I address more philosophical, spiritual, and speculative ideas. There will be a “Tech” topic where I’ll describe the architecture of my site, as well as any explorations of the technological world I undertake, and a “Flashes (of Inspiration)” topic, which is basically a “fleeting thoughts/commonplace book” area. Finally, there will be a “Table of Contents” that will help people get oriented and explore the area(s) of the garden they find most interesting. In this area, I will have a “Captain’s Log” where I keep a reverse-chronological list of changes I’ve made on Prezi – that way, a repeat visitor can simply check in for changes since their last visit (assuming there are visitors, and that they come back more than once). Of course, more topics can be added later as needed.

I’m currently building the Prezi site and learning more of the ins-and-outs of that application, and I’m having fun! I’m finding a structure for my own retirement life and learning, and I think a side benefit will be motivation for continued home improvement projects.

I was surprised at how much the implosion of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Miami brought back emotions from 9/11 that I didn’t even know I had.

Defeatist.

This is getting really annoying. The level of corruption is disgusting .

apnews.com/article/p…

A message for fans of John Couger Mellencamp: you can stop holding on to 16. He meant 60. Hold on to 60 as long as you can.

The stock market’s reaction to Trump’s insanity is simultaneously predictable and ridiculous. Our entire culture has been marinated in crass stupidity. I can’t believe I have to live through this nonsense at my age.

WTF, Massachusetts!

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” – Toni Morrison, Nobel Acceptance Speech

So the first question, I guess, is: what sort of platform is my new project going to live on?

I really, really like the look of my Micro.blog site , and I’d love to be writing here. I could just provide links back and forth between posts, and I guess provide a pinned table of contents page that would allow me (and any readers) to choose their own pathway through the site. I would be fighting against the traditional reverse-chronology structure of a blog. Are there ways to embed pictures or video within a post, if that came up? I haven’t tried that yet.

I could use something like Scalar, “a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed (at USC) to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Great for creating complex, multi-modal essays.” I mean, who wouldn’t want to create complex, multimodal essays? Scalar is available on my Reclaim hosting service, and I’ve used it before for several of my books. It allows me to create alternative paths through the material, and also automatically creates a table of contents as I go. It’s a little clunky, and isn’t the most attractive platform, but it would be free and I have experience using it.

I could also use Obsidian (or Roam for “daily auto-back-linked-wiki interconnected brain dumps…") or Notion. Obsidian actually bills itself as “The easiest way to publish your wiki, knowledge base, documentation, or digital garden.” I’ve used it before, but have never felt as if I’d mastered it. It feels sort of like WordPress, in that it is overrun with hundreds (thousands?) of plug-ins that I’m sure do all kinds of cool and useful things, but it feels like I could spend a lot of time going down those rabbit holes and YouTube tutorials. Also, if I wanted to make what I write available for others to read, I’d need to buy the Publish option, which is $8 - $10 a month. I have to say that I’ve never found Obsidian aesthetically pleasing – maybe there are plug-ins to change the skin? (This is the same issue I have with the wikis I have available through Reclaim – they all look like MediaWiki/Wikipedia, which I find kind of blurgh.)

I’ve never used Roam, but it looks very similar to Obsidian, and is $15 a month (I’m assuming this allows me to make the files public, like Obsidian Publish). Both Obsidian and Roam are more naturally digital garden-like – you’re not creating workarounds to fight the reverse-chronology blog format – but oof! they’re really ugly. Maybe you Obsidian users can tell me how to change the visuals. @amerpie ? At $100/year +/-, I’d want to make sure this project isn’t just a wild hare.

I’ve also used Notion, and I find it easier to use than Obsidian, and more attractive out of the box. But I’ve learned that having my work on somebody else’s platform is dangerous. (For instance, I’ve lost access to my Substack blog and have no idea how to get it back. I also used to write for The Clyde Fitch Report, which is no longer available on the web.)

I guess I could also use Moodle, which I used when I was teaching, and which is available on Reclaim. My memory is that it was flexible, but really made for education, and overall kind of ugly. But I haven’t used it for five years, so I have no idea what it’s like now.

Also, there’s Are.na, which is very different, and I don’t really get yet. But it makes me think of Fizzy, which is basically a very attractive Kan-Ban. I like Fizzy aesthetically, and I think it has possibilities, but I suspect it isn’t ideal for this particular project.

Everything has trade-offs, and nothing jumps out as the Obvious Choice.

So: If anyone has suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Update: Are.na is more like a Pinterest board, which is valuable as a place for me to collect ideas for future writing, but not appropriate for the writing itself.

Update 2: What about Prezi? As a retired educator with an .edu email address available to me, I can get access for $48/yr. The platform seems flexible for creating a presentation, and you can make it aesthetically pleasing. Also, you can easily make your work public (in fact, it looks as if public is the default, although once you move beyond the free version you can control access). Visitors can follow their own paths, which seems in keeping with the digital garden orientation. I’m not sure how massive a presentation can be – i.e., would there be a single home page where all the topics I explore are found, or would it be more like unique topic folders? My vague memory is that you can zoom in through a lot of layers. The whole AI thing seems irrelevant to how I’d be using it. All of this surprises me, as it didn’t occur to me that presentation software might be useful for this project. I haven’t used Prezi much (I experimented with it long ago when it was still new), so there would be a learning curve. Something to experiment with. I wonder whether people would be turned off to find themselves in a Prezi presentation? (And does that matter to me? Or am I thinking in terms of other people rather than my own preferences and uses?)

Lately, I’ve been (once again) inspired by the concept of the “digital garden” as an alternative to a blog, but I haven’t had much luck figuring out what I wanted to explore in this way. I’m a long-time blogger, having started Theatre Ideas in the fall of 2005, and writing on it as well as a number of other sites since then. And while my blogging has always had an interdisciplinary slant, the central topic has always been theater.

In 2020, at the age of 62, I retired from my job as a Drama professor. At first, I kept very busy, first editing my late friend and mentor’s book Mark Twain and Me: Unlearning Racism, followed by several books I’d always wanted to write but lacked the time to do so: Building a Sustainable Theater, DIY Theater MFA, Play Analysis in Action_, and finally a full rewrite of my textbook Introduction to Play Analysis.

And then, well, I found that I was done writing about theater. Oh, I tried to continue, writing Theater Ideas (notice the subtle change from “TheatRE” to “TheatER” to differentiate the two blogs – clever, huh?) on Substack, and then on my own website in conjunction with my posts here on Micro.blog.

But over the past year, I’ve finally had to admit to myself that, well, I just don’t have anything more to say about theater. Which, after doing theater for over 50 years, came as a bit of a shock. I had successfully delayed having to deal with the Big Retirement Question “who am I now that I’m not working?” for five years, but now…here I am. Actually, the question isn’t about my identity, but rather “what is going to fill up the theater-sized hole in my mind?” I still love writing and I’d like to continue doing it, I still have a great deal of curiosity, but I haven’t been able to settle on anything long enough to have anything worthwhile to say about it. So instead I wander the halls of my mind, picking up random books as I go, and basically just bumping into my own intellectual walls.

Today, as I drove in to work out at Planet Fitness, I was listening to an episode of Derek Thompson’s excellent podcast Plain English entitled “How Metrics Make Us Miserable," in which Thompson interviews philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. As I listened to Nguyen talk about the effects of two ranking systems dominating his discipline of philosophy (rankings of the prestige of journals, and rankings of philosophy departments – who knew? Is there something similar for theater journals and departments?), it gradually dawned on me that the real struggle of retirement, for me at least, may be that, after years of playing The Game, I looked up to see that the clock is at 00:00, the scoreboard has been unplugged, and so I have no way of determining “How Am I Doing?” If I spend one day painting the living room, the next day napping and watching the rain fall, and a third day writing a blog post, each day is equally OK. There’s not going to be an end-of-year evaluation in which my accomplishments are weighed.

So: I now find myself standing outside the toxic capitalist emphasis on productivity and prestige, and I had to answer to no one except myself. Which seems like it would be freeing, but it’s a horrifying thought, because I am way more demanding than any department chair or dean I ever worked for. I’m not someone who dreamt of retiring so that I could play golf or fish or garden or travel; instead, I dreamt of finally having time to read and write and think, but suddenly I found that I had exhausted my interest in my main topic in five years time! Now what???

Today, I thought: maybe that’s my topic, my digital garden, my learning in public: how to retire. Or rather, how do I retire? How do I play the game without a scoreboard, just for the joy of playing? It’s not anything particularly original – there are quite a few books and podcasts on this topic already, I suspect, and I have no intention of trying to break into that market. But it seems like it might help ME – might be a way to justify writing without worrying about whether anybody else is reading. Puttering with a Purpose!

There are a lot of ways to go with this, and platforms to use. Maybe that’s for next time. For now, we’ll see if this can keep my attention, and maybe I’ll even learn something about myself!